Alle Kapitel von The Billionaire's Fifty-Dollar Mistress: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 7

They let me keep the stapler.Of all things, that was what I kept thinking about on the drive home. Two hundred analysts worked on the fourth floor of Brennan & Cole, and at nine-fifteen this morning a woman from Ashcroft Holdings stood at the front of the room in a grey suit and told half of us that our positions had been “absorbed.” She said it the way you’d announce a change to the cafeteria menu. Then a security guard named Phil, who I’d bought birthday cake for last spring, stood over my desk while I packed four years into a cardboard box. When I reached for the stapler, he shrugged and said, “Take it. Nobody’s gonna miss it.”Nobody was going to miss me either, apparently.I handed him my badge on its lanyard before I remembered that my apartment key was clipped to the same ring. By then he’d already dropped it into a plastic tub with everyone else’s, and the look he gave me when I asked for it back told me exactly how much patience he had left for sad women with boxes.So I’d h

My left shoe was under his bed, and I had to lie flat on a carpet that probably cost more than my car to reach it.The bathroom door was shut and the shower was running. Grey morning light poured through a wall of glass that looked out over the whole of South Valley, with the river curling through it and the towers of the financial district so close I could have read the logos on them if my head hadn’t been pounding. I grabbed the shoe, sat up, and caught my reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall. My hair was wild, my blouse was buttoned wrong, and there was a mark on my neck that hadn’t been there yesterday.Last night came back to me in pieces. His hands. His voice in my ear, low and rough, asking if I was sure, and then not asking anymore because I’d made it very clear. The way he’d taken his time with me, as though he had nowhere else in the world to be. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and waited for the shame to arrive.It never quite did. What came instead w

I didn’t sit down.I stood just inside the door with my purse clutched against my stomach and stared at the money on his desk, and every clever thing I’d rehearsed on the bus vanished from my head.“If this is about the fifty dollars,” I said, “I was drunk, and it was a joke, and you can keep it. Consider it a tip.”“I intend to keep it.” He came around the desk, and the room seemed to shrink. In daylight he was even bigger than I remembered, broad and solid, his shirt stretched across his chest and shoulders, a vein standing out along one forearm. He stopped close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes. “Nobody’s ever paid me before, Ivy. I found it educational.”My face went hot. “Why am I here?”“Sit, and I’ll tell you.”This time I sat. He didn’t go back behind the desk. Instead he leaned against the front of it with his long legs crossed at the ankle and picked up a thin folder.“Ivy Monroe. Twenty-six. Top analyst at Brennan & Cole two years running. Eight months

The cab driver made me pay before he’d load the bags.Forty-two dollars to the north bank, he said, cash or card up front, and he watched me tap my phone with the face of a man who’d picked up a lot of crying women from a lot of gutters and wasn’t about to get stiffed by another one. My eleven hundred dollars became one thousand and fifty-eight. I sat in the back seat with two garbage bags piled on my lap and one at my feet, holding my grandmother’s frame against my chest, and I kept my mind blank until the car stopped.The Ashcroft estate sat on a hill above the river behind black iron gates, and from the road all I could see was a long drive lined with lamps and the glow of a house so big it could have been a hotel. The driver dumped my bags on the gravel and drove off before I’d even shut the door.A guard stepped out of the booth by the gate. He looked at my wet hair, my ruined blouse and my garbage bags, and his hand went to the radio on his belt.“Deliveries go through the servi